And I decided to port a couple of FF7 songs to the Sega Mega Drive using Deflemask. The Mega Drive's chip is definitely weird and interesting, some things are ridiculously easy to do and others almost impossible. I like to cheat and use a single 4-op instrument to simulate 2 2-op instruments, in order to get more channels.What do you guys think ?

The sound pretty nice, but Parochial and Reactor seem to do something wrong - at some point they end up playing one single note for eternity (on multiple Genesis emulators, I made a ROM with these since I don't have any VGM player). For Parochial it sounded like an organ and for Reactor it was noise.

I liked FF7REACTOR the best of these. The timpani + drone orchestration works very well.

Thanks.

Quote:

In FF7PAROCHIAL I wish the glassy keyboard sound had a longer presence; the attack portion of the sound is really good, but it seems to fade off really quick to me.

That's because I was lazy to insert some keyoff events. But I now fixed it. It's actually very touchy, I only reduced the decay by 1 and it already makes a lot of difference - reducing by 2 would make it fade too long.

I've done exactly that sort of "cheating" for just-intonation perfect fourths (3:4 frequency ratio) and perfect fifths (2:3 frequency ratio) in TFM Music Maker. Use the algorithm that looks like this:

Code:

[Mod1]->[Car1]--. | (+)-->[Out] |[Mod2]->[Car2]--'

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's algorithm 4.

This will produce intervals so long as the ratio between the "multiple" values for carrier 1 and carrier 2 is something like 2:3 or 3:4. To ensure the same timbre for both voices, make the ratio between the "multiple" values for modulator 1 and carrier 1 the same as that for modulator 2 and carrier 2. Then you can make major, minor, or suspended triads and their inversions by using this instrument on two channels, with carrier 2 of the second channel muted.

Could be Deflemask allows you to do things the hw won't allow? You mention cheating, maybe it was that? (No, I don't understand what 4-op and 2-op mean)

I doubt. "Cheating" means abusing the chips to create 5th chords with a single channel, and I'm pretty sure the hardware allows that.

The principle behind FM, 4op FM in this case, is that one FM "voice" is actually made up out of 4 different sinewave voices that can be connected in a variety of algorithms. You can string together 4 in a row to create more complex sounds, or you can have them in pairs of 2 which sacrifices complexity of timbre in favor of either "baked" harmonies (similar to sampled chords), or detuned unison/chorus layering.

A few existing games do this to get around the 6 channel limit for harmony. Thunder Force IV uses a bunch of different instruments/patches with different intervals like fifths, fourths, major/minor thirds, etc. These are then combined to create those juicy 4 tone chords at the expense of only 2 channels.

Now, a much less used "cheaty" yet fully hardware supported trick is to sub-divide FM channel 3 and control each operator independantly, so you can effectively treat that as 2 separate 2op channels which is a lot more flexible than relying on static, pre-programmed intervals in different patches.

Your version of the Reactor theme honestly sounds better than most stuff I've heard in actual MegaDrive games. Amazing production.

Wow thank you uut it's really just a port I did quickly without thinking much about it. It doesn't even use any tricks like the other two song does to increase the # of channels, it simply uses arpeggio on PSG channel.

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I also did some music. This is NES + VRC6. I'm planning on making a YM2612 version and SPC700 version too.

Ok, personally I find the song to be rather bland, and not very memorable. It doesn't seem to even use much of the VRC6 features and could almost be a 2A03 only. Not that I like to bash your work, but I'd rather be honnest and give negative but constructive feedback rather than lie and say I like it.

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